Saturday, October 30, 2010

Tasty Minstrel Kickstarter fund drive

Tasty Minstrel games has started a Kickstarter fund drive for its next release, a space-themed card game called Eminent Domain. Tasty Minstrel is a small company (two games in print, two more on the way) run by two guys, Michael Mindes and Seth Jaffee.

They've funded their publishing costs out-of-pocket, and I think they're getting close to breaking even. But it's hard to keep publishing if all you're doing is breaking even. As a result, they're using Kickstarter to fund their next release. The fund drive is mostly set up as a pre-order site; for $35, you get a copy of the game shipped to you when it's ready, and they have other more lavish rewards for higher donation values.

They're looking for $20,000 in funding, which seems like a tall order - that would be nearly 600 games they'd have to pre-sell. It's also a bit odd for an existing company to be fundraising in this manner; it sort of seems like if you already exist, you shouldn't be hitting up friends and fans for startup cash, but I think the pathetic economics of the game publishing industry might justify it in this case.

There's nothing wrong with pre-selling, of course; many companies do that, particularly in the console game industry. It allows the publisher not to have to take as big a bet as they would otherwise, and it allows them to gauge interest in their products. GMT Games does much the same thing with their P500 program, where they don't print a game until it has 500 guaranteed customers.

We'll see how they do; they've given themselves a month for the $20,000, so it shouldn't take long to find out.